Gary Peters

A FEW moments with ...

America's Monopoly Champ Makes A Living Playing The Game For Real Dollars

December 15, 1991|By Charles Fishman

You'd expect America's reigning Monopoly champion to have some stylistic flourishes when he sits down to do a little land dealing with the dice, the pastel piles of cash, the race car (''it speeds around the board'') and what may be the most familiar collection of real estate in the world. Mostly, though, Gary Peters is watchful.

He has a silver crown of hair and the calmly amused look of knowing a lot more about what's happening than you do. Occasionally, when it's his turn to roll, he sweeps the dice to himself with the temple of his reading glasses and the practiced stroke of a croupier presiding over his craps table.

In casual play -around his kitchen table, in this case, with his children, his daughter's boyfriend and me -he offers quiet advice that may not help you win this game, but has a certain timeless quality.

Some of it takes the form of aphorism: ''So goes Tennessee Avenue, so goes the game.''

Some is bluntly common-sensical: ''When someone owes you money, don't bargain with them. Sit there like this'' -Peters crosses his arms -''and say, ''You owe me $600. Please pay.' It's also a good time to just get up and get yourself some frozen yogurt.''

Some is a bit more strategic: ''You can win with the red monopoly and the railroads. I've won championships that way.''

And some is the wisdom of Zen Buddhism, adapted for a board game: ''Don't forget the p-word. Patience. Sometimes patience is the best way to go.''

None of which helps me, at least not this evening as I'm playing my first game of Monopoly in a decade. In a five-person game, I'm the first one bankrupt, landing on Boardwalk, which has been bolstered by a trio of houses. There is quick consolation, however. The champ is the second one out, also a victim of Boardwalk.

HERE'S HOW MUCH MONOPOLY Gary Peters plays: He sponsors one scholarship tournament each year for high school students, he sponsors another tournament to raise money for a favorite charity, he plays routinely with his office staff, and during a recent vacation in the empty wilderness of Wyoming, his family played 55 games in four weeks. It's quite possible to imagine that a person who plays that much Monopoly might be a little geeky -that he might be sort of the Monopoly equivalent of a Trekkie.

It is Peters' profession that turns the Monopoly stereotype inside out.

Gary Peters -everyone calls him ''GP'' -actually plays Monopoly all day long. He is a smooth, charming Wall Street veteran, who heads a group that deals in a high-stakes item called mortgage-backed securities. These are investments in which the investors end up owning part of a large chunk of mortgages that some bank has bundled up and is selling off. It's not exactly like holding the property cards in Monopoly and watching the rent roll in, but it's close.

''I buy from all the big guys on Wall Street -they have pieces of $100 million deals they want to sell, I buy one or two or three pieces, and we resell them. I buy in blocks of more than $10 million and resell in blocks of less than a million.''

Peters' group turns over almost $1 billion in mortgage-backed securities a month, taking a few pennies on each transaction for their trouble. These pennies enable Peters -father of five, including a 14-month-old -to drive a car-phone-equipped Mercedes and provide his family with one of those newish, big-windowed, atrium-equipped homes in a gated and guarded subdivision in Coral Springs.

Peters, who will only say he is ''49-plus,'' has a faint southern accent, left over from being raised in Memphis, and is both soft-spoken and crisply authoritative. It's not hard to imagine him making instantaneous decisions about $20 million deals based on a few lightning calculations done in his head.

So where does the passion for Monopoly come in? Well, when was the last time you played? Peters played as a kid, and then routinely as a penniless young married man, with friends, strictly as a cheap form of entertainment. He took it back up when his kids were little.

The game is actually more fun than most adults remember. Played at Peters' level, it combines the strategy of chess, the demeanor of poker, the pace of a video-game and the deal-making derring-do of a top-flight Wall Street takeover artist. The key is that every property gets acquired the first time someone lands on it -either by purchase or auction -and soon everyone has enough property that negotiation, re-sales and trading become the major strategic factor in the game.

''I get a lot of pleasure from it,'' says Peters. ''I play it for the same reason I play golf. Every time you play is different. It's easy to play, but you can play game after game because the personalities make such a difference. There are good losers and bad losers, good negotiators and bad negotiators.

At the Monopoly board, Peters has a relaxed manner that bespeaks more than just familiarity -it is the air of ownership. Peters says the game is ''half skill, half luck,'' although it's surely not simple coincidence that he's national champ for the second time in a row.

Still, as his wife Cecelia says, ''Everybody beats Dad sometimes.'' And at the last world championship, teenage son Steve invited the reigning world champ to a friendly game and whipped him.

Peters' oldest son, Greg, 32, works with his dad in the day-side Monopoly dealings, but is the only sibling who boycotts the smaller-stakes evening games. ''He refuses to play,'' says Peters, grinning. ''Says I made him play too much when he was young. Which is a lie.''